How Ruby Studio built trusted design on reliability

About Ruby Studio

Ruby Studio is a full-service web agency offering design, development, hosting, and support with an entrepreneurial mind and a strong aesthetic position. Our strategy favours long-term client relationships, and we have become the ideal partner to many online companies.

Ever since the establishment of Ruby Studio in 2010, we have been shuffling between hosting companies reselling average solutions in fancy wrapping.

Building the website for the incredible architects at Bjarke Ingels Group in 2013 put Ruby Studio on the map. Thanks to this, we have been a trusted web partner for many high profile sites ever since. Today, we realised visual identities for both Danish and International clients. Being a trusted full-service partner, hosting is crucial to our strategy.

Previous challenges

Lack of control and transparency are common issues with being a simple reseller that can harm your reputation. Furthermore, we realised that even the best support or the easiest control panel will not outweigh reliability. Everyone loses when the websites you are supposed to be responsible for keep crashing. Stability issues during busy Christmas sales will result in frustrated and furious calls from clients. At such times, your only option is to apologise and promise to look into it right away. Eventual call to your hosting provider just confirms your fears that they haven’t even noticed the problem yet.

We always came back to the same problem – too much downtime. The lack of reaction to triggered alarms that supposedly were in place to ensure minimum downtime was disappointing. Therefore, we started looking for a world-class server infrastructure and a renowned company to manage our new servers. In 2016 we met with UpCloud representatives and from day 1 we saw profound professionalism and a cloud hosting setup so superior to everything we had ever experienced.

Hosting on UpCloud

We have structured our hosting solution around a dedicated provider who can focus on creating a stronger product. While a separate team deals with 24/7 monitoring and active management. We are very proud of our setup and what we are able to offer – not only to Ruby Studio clients – but also to all Danish website owners with our new branch, Ruby Cloud.

Right now we have some thirty cloud servers in use, with daily backup, distributed across UpCloud’s global network of data centres. We always recommend dedicated cloud servers to our clients for the best results. For the smaller clients, we offer a shared solution with a maximum of 8 websites per server that we call “The Commune”. Among shared cloud hosting solutions, a maximum of only 8 websites is really beyond compare.

All our servers are set up by our management partner team who maintain and monitor the infrastructure. Together we have created an automation script, which makes it easy to set up a server within minutes. The script is constantly improved to match our latest requirements. From 2018 all our new servers run on Ubuntu 16.04 with the latest version of PHP and MySQL improving security and overall speed of the websites.

Improvements

We have had all Ruby Studio clients on UpCloud servers since 2016 without even a single minute of server related downtime. Today our third-party server management team is also fully on board. They actively monitor the cloud servers and react on custom load alarms. This is our no-compromise solution for reliability.

With the new solution, we have achieved complete transparency and control. Thus, if we experience issues with a server, our server team will always be on top of it even before a client reports the issue. All events are logged and we can follow all incidences via Skype, email, and dashboard in real time.

Future plans

Right now we specialise in enterprise WordPress hosting and local clients. With the global datacentre network available we will open up for international clients when the time is right. Settling in Denmark is now the first priority. UpCloud’s world-class services should be for everyone, and by continually improving processes, we hope to become an officially recognised UpCloud partner.

Check out the guide below on how to deploy a containerised WordPress site.

Phone

Email

London

London was our second office to open, and a important step in introducing UpCloud to the world. Here our amazing staff can help you with both sales and support, in addition to host tons of interesting meetups.